When a European Intel exec was recently said to have claimed future iPhones will use the chip giant's Atom processor, the company quickly stated the fellow alleged no such thing. But now someone else has made that very claim.
JoAnne Feeney, an analyst with US investment hours FTN Midwest Securities, recently told clients that …

Title should be:

What the **** is an anal yst

These dopes have more doping than a 32nm Moorestown. They read macrumors, thereg and appleinsider. Then they're called analysts. I used to wonder what researchers at investment banks did. They google and rfead. Great, eh! Analyse my arse.

Title should be

Deep C Phishing .....

"Of course, what's not clear is why Feeney thinks Apple would migrate its Arm-based iPhone over to the x86 platform." ..... It is as clear as FUD, Tony ....... they are trying to maintain a cash cow which is way past its sell-by date, having been outsmarted by SMARTer Advanced Risc Theories/Methodologies ...... Hot Intellectual Property.

Intel inside have been ......"cloned" and now have a next generation rival/quantum leap architecture, which it cannot recognise because of a)the ARM way of doing business .... and b) a new way of providing Real Time, Future Security in Present Environments.

x86 phone!

ARM licensees can sandwich the RAM and FLASH inside the regular CPU BGA package as the heat is so low. No heatsink. 633MHz today.

In 2010 an ARM will be similar power consumption and 2GHz. Or 1Ghz and about 1/4 current consumption.

Today an Atom SYSTEM inc chipset is about x5 to x10 the power consumption of an ARM based SYSTEM, which can be one 17mm x 17mm x 3mm "Module". Atom needs 4 to 5 packages to do the same thing.

Also for SAME clock speed ARM can do some common things x4 faster and usually the SoC has separate HW for MPEG2, MPEG4 (code or decode) , BitBlit, video Rotate, LCD and TV drive etc... Typically an x86 uses the CPU for many of these. Some ARM 533MHz SOC can outperform desktop P4 CPUS @ 2.4GHz doing MPEG.

Why should they?

I can't see any reason for Apple putting an Atom processor in a next-generation iPhone. Compared to ARMs at similar compute power, Atoms are costly and power-hungry.

Some people claim that it would allow Apple to focus on a single processor architecture over all platforms (desktop, laptop, phone, MP3), but I don't buy that. Apple has (from previous bad experiences) made sure the are not tied to a single processor. Being largely processor-independent allows Apple to choose the processors best suited for each individual platform and to change this at short notice, should something better show up. And I don't for a second believe Atom is something better than ARM showing up. On the contrary, I would expect Apple to use ARM in more systems, from iPods up to Eee-style laptots.

Given the popularity of laptots, it seems inevitable that Apple will try to redife them as they did with MP3 players, smartphones and laptops (the now almost universal laptop design originated in a MacBook). And I can imagine it would sell very well due to the coolness factor and brand recognition.

If she's so clever....

I hope she signs up to help with the engineering...

She is pulling this out of her bottom as she clearly does not understand anything about hardware or software design.

For every move that Atom can do to save power (voltage reduction, process improvement...) ARM can do the same and just move the game. Atom will never catch ARM. While Atom is whooping about 4W, ARM is running at welll under 1W.

If anything, I expect to see the move go the other way: ARM displacing x86 from laptots. The only real reason to use x86 in laptots is to run Windows. Linux, OSX etc run perfectly well on a wide variety of architectures, including ARM, and if vendors don't want to run Windows they can cut x86 loose, getting cheaper, smaller, lighter systems.